“For thorns also have flowers: some actions truly seem rough, seem savage; howbeit they are done for discipline at the bidding of charity. Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”

Homily 7 on the First Epistle of John (Augustine).

And yet, witnessing it play out in the public is unsettling. The unreal has so poisoned society that no one really seems to notice the consequences. We are all astronauts looking down on earth from space as we sit in the closed ecology of our empty rooms, our brittle topography, “communicating”, as it were – with other astronauts, each of them orbiting the same earth. Each of them, equally detached in their lone trajectory. Each of them behind the luminous LCD-screen of their laptop. Each of their fingers trapped in the crevices of their keyboards.

Though Virilio speaks of what speed has done to transform society far better than any amateur ever could (or, battle being lost, has any reason to), perhaps the real started to blur for us as human race when we first sat behind the dashboard of a car. The driver, plugged into his machine, shielded by steel and glass, accelerated his way through the veins of the motorway system, the landscape consequently dissolving into blurring images that bore no meaning except for their own disruptive esthetic. Something similar happens when we board, or fly, an airplane. And for want of that, something similar is happening behind a computer screen. Millions of intertwined networks, each lost in a personal ectasy of communication, tinker with the few remaining integral structures of culture. Each network cannibalizing its heritage at the highest possible velocity. With every single bit of communication, culture becomes more and more truncated, meaningless. Lost. Cut adrift from the surroundings that gave it meaning.

Everyone, and everything is speaking simultaneously. There is no one to interrupt the harmful and no one to shield the good. And why should there be? There is no point in doing so – nothing matters long enough in the New Unreal. The Global is a virus of total exchange, obliterating individuality and making locality purposeless. Humanity has become its own mad cow disease, a pandemic, a holy union of sacred unilateral pertaining everything.

A parable then: The human (race) is a perfect terrorist. As terrorism is an inescapable bi-product of global power, leaking from its structure, a faceless and nameless counter-power, the human has transformed into a festering, terrorist, virus on the corpse of Earth, attempting to destroy its true, global power. Yet we all know that ultimately, terrorism has no means of overthrowing the world order. The quest is an abberant one.

Baudrillard speaks of a non-Euclidean space where causality reverses and collapses. A catastrophic universe where rogue, disjointed, events happen spurned by the destruction of their carriers, their hosts.

Notice, for instance, how everyone, from the lowest commoner to the media “elite” is talking about these rogue events. The cataclysms, the acts of terrorism. “It was like something from a movie”, is a common phrase used by modern people. Two decades ago, without the speed of events, a comment like that would have been preposterous, laughable, naive even. Not so today.

Perhaps the phrase took hold immediately after September 11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers. The disbelief of the real was to some a part of their immune system. If you can’t believe it, then it does not have to be true. Even if it is. Truth and reality have become subjective and non-real. Non-Euclidean. The phrase “it was like something from a movie” is a semantic talisman, dampening the effects of the real, protecting the frail, corroded, weak human mind from the inevitable attack of the Real.

If that is a correct assumption, the terrorists of September 11 took away far more than the West’s sense of security. They took away the West’s sense of Reality. Because after all – how could the Twin Towers, the perfect reflective Twins – fall? Humans, lulled for years in the narcotic effects of the digital and habits of velocity simply chose not to believe the terrorist act passing into the Real before their eyes. The act that was more than real.

Since then, the phrase is used without afterthought, on any a small or large happening. There is no longer a Real. What remains is the astronaut, orbiting earth, forever secretly longing for an impossible re-entry. A re-entry that he knows will burn him on impact. So the Astronaut, the new non-Euclidean human, invents proxies by which to re-enter. Social media. A life lived digitally. A perpetual state of agitation. The normality of the unquiet mind. A wish for the Singular. A secret desire to melt into everything. A digital Buddhism in its own, binary, orgiastic delight. A birth and a death fused into a single event.

We can witness the effects online – more than anywhere. For the causal still exists, even though expelled from the realm of the Human. Stars move in spite of the New Human, and have always done so. The human, as an unfortunate cosmic accident is collapsing down into his final phase of object death, the universe unmoved by his passing. A too harsh a sentence? No. After the non-Euclidean there can be nothing. Truncate the snake into too small pieces and the snake will not re-assemble.

In these final days of the human mind as it has been up until now, Non-Euclideans share images, phrases, pieces of torn culture at a frantic pace. Hurling bits and pieces of information at one another in an endearing but ultimately futile attempt at rebellion. A passive protest. A barrage of imagery, stolen, regurgitated piecemeal at the mesmerized audience, perhaps as form of economical sabotage. Hurled at society in a final collective afterthought: “Perhaps it was wrong to assume that all our values were economical in character”. Perhaps it was wrong to assign an exchange rate to all that mattered. Perhaps we had set the limits too high. Production quotas as unrealistic as our dreams of eternal resources. The ecology movement; a stoic yet aberrant notion at reversal. We have eaten from the cake, it is too late to speculate if it is palatable.

Capital has become one’s personal ability to transfer to the Unreal. The sharing of stolen matter and thought, imagery and texts is the way by which the Unreal proliferates. Social media behemoths, Google, Facebook, pave the way. A way to monetize triviality, a social game from which there is no distraction. From which there is no escape. One does not escape the terror of the Unreal. Humanity, confronted with the perfect and divine model of itself – cannot bear the symbolism. Humanity, confronted with the speed and perfection of the Machine, surrenders to it, helplessly flapping its arms at her own fallibility. The Machine. More human than human itself, in the words of Phillip K. Dick’s Dr. Eldon Tyrell.

What remains, is a collective state of picnolepsy – the mind interrupted by millions of flickering senseless images, an Unreal universe without afterthought or coherent value. Without understandable codes and unquestionable ethics. All that is left after culture has eaten its own bones – is starvation.

Welcome to the non-Euclidean space.

It is your final one, Human.

“History that repeats itself turns into farce. But a farce that repeats itself ends up making history”.

- Jean Baudrillard

Following the massacre in Norway on the 22nd July 2011, a deluge of information has hit the general public. Nothing, it seems, has been left without careful scrutiny.  As opposing factions don war paints in an effort to turn the event in their favor, a fact as tasteless as indicative of the morally bankrupt state of Europe, reports of every conceivable fact reach an expecting audience. An audience that in spite of being historically over priviledged on the account of information is insatiable in its greed for it. Insatiable, and for the most part incapable of performing a mature and personal analysis of the situation. In the information deluge, every piece of fact has an equal worth and the most ludicrous details are portrayed as matters of grave importance.

There is a near absolute vacuum of apolitical, level headed analysis. The capital sin of turning this modern day Herostratus (name omitted on purpose) misdeed into personal virtue is a sickening event to watch, with surprisingly thoughtless statements from combatants on either side of the political fence.

However, a few sources remain that with consummate consistency appear to be able to de-politicize news in the attempt to sift facts from opinions. The Global Intelligence agency, STRATFOR, is such a source. Almost exclusively a paid service (though there are a few articles each week open to the public), they provide the kind of guidance modern man needs, yet for the most part, shuns. When looking for sources and facts, news and their sources – journalists, due to their political nature as well as being victims of external manipulation are next to useless. There are no better news than intelligence and an alert, objective, mind.

Incidentally – there’s a mind trick that’s useful to remember when distinguishing news from opinions. Whenever a text is written in a (overt or covert) manner suggesting of what the author thinks should happen, be careful, you are being manipulated. And if so, you’re quite likely reading the news. The reverse speaks for itself.

In two recent STRATFOR articles (no link, texts available only for paying members), analysts discuss the Norwegian event from a causal angle. The gist of it is found to be that with the mainstreaming of far-right political parties, extreme elements such as modern day Herostratus are jettisoned in favor of public, and electorate, appeal. That in turn leads to extremists that otherwise would have been provided with a dampening framework are left out in the cold – and more importantly, left to their own devices to act.

STRATFOR:

As part of their makeover, many of Europe’s most powerful far-right parties have had to clean up their rhetoric and act as members of the mainstream. They have also had to jettison their most extremist elements. This process has left many, including Breivik, the suspect in the Oslo attack, on the outside looking in. However extreme their notions, these parties had a moderating influence on their most extreme members, who are no longer allowed to participate in clubs, associations and parties because they would compromise far-right parties’ efforts to gain political legitimacy. In this process, these individuals have been left without a group in which to belong.

Far-right parties are under a democratic system no different from their widely accepted counterparts (in spite of curious efforts to question the fact). They tend to move to the middle in order to attract public opinion and warrant their own survival. Simply, each thing that is born struggles to survive. Far-right parties, lemmings, human babies or even common bread mold, is not significantly different in this respect. Thus, in order to survive one has to adopt viable strategies. The situation is, on its zero level, seldom more complicated than so. The complications arise with political interpretation, personal agenda, beliefs, socio-economical atmosphere – and presumably of a other thousand contingencies for which this article is too brief to consider.

Extremist groups that moderate their behavior and agenda is nothing new. The ostracizing of unwanted factions in groups who strive for public appeal has previously yielded results akin to the recent event in Norway.

STRATFOR:

This process is not unique. It occurred in Europe in the late 1960s when a slew of Marxists and Communists decided to eschew international revolution, mainly due to the combined effects of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring. The Soviet Union was revealed for what it truly was: a self-interested geopolitical hegemon looking to preserve its sphere of influence, not an altruistic socialist experiment. En masse, former committed Communists became center-left Social Democrats, moderating their demands and becoming committed liberals and socialists. Many of these former student revolutionary leaders are now prominent European statesmen, very much members of the political mainstream.

However, not everyone followed this transformation. The fringe element, ostracized by their less extreme left-wing counterparts, formed their own groups. Many of them are remembered for how violent and militant they became, including the Red Army Faction, Direct Action, November 17 and the Red Brigades.

Reading up on some of the actions of the fringe groupings mentioned in the above quote, is truly disheartening. And so it turns out that objective logic works in much the same way for the extreme left as it does for the extreme right. The farce has turned into history. And it did so during an age where information is said to set the citizen “free”. During an age where the northern hemisphere need but flick a switch to be with spectacular ease able to read about similar, historical events. If we’re guilty of anything, it’s certainly not of creating a certain political climate. We’re not even guilty of any of the “phobias” that the press is so keen to assign blame to.

We’re simply – all of us – astoundingly, irreversibly culpable of being a herd of shockingly stupid creatures who have refused, and always will refuse to learn from history. As Baudrillard suggests we repeat our farce, turn it back to history – then with no further ado proceed to do it over, and over, and over and over again.

Presumably, in the words of Macbeth, until the last syllable of recorded time.

Now that Modernity is dead – the process of thinking and creating is contaminated with the process of technological automatizations, turning creators into machine-operators, mere automatons set on channeling the appropriate amount of voltage, trend sensitivity and maximizing the degree of incoming links in order to better masturbate the ego – suddenly, everyone is calling themselves curators.

In the Old World, a curator was, according to the collectivist automatons at Wikipedia:

“… a keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or archive) is a content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections. The object of a traditional curator’s concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be inter alia artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections. More recently, new kinds of curators are emerging: curators of digital data objects, and biocurators.”

Curators. Critics. Or both. In the post-post-Modern, everyone is a critic. Countless are the sites that have rebranded their effort from “blogger” to “curator”. A marketing ploy in keeping with the destruction of High Art concepts. The street is the Institution and the Institution no longer a boundary with requisites. A morally and ethically corrupt venue, slave to cultural cowardice, a deranged Dr. Frankenstein bringing to life the hastily re-stitched monster of multiculturalism on a seething bed of false narrative.

The digital world is suffering from attention deficit disorder. A state where posting pictures and random texts, snippets of music and other binary bric-a-brac at a hysterical rate, creating an over-consumption of narrative and in doing so all but destroying form and meaning. The digital is a flawed museum, amplifying the structural failure of Museums – a catalogue of ideologies in a world that no longer heeds ideology.

Digital curators are the henchmen of content psychosis, a delirious state where narrative and concept are separated from meaning and orthographic structure. “Nothing is as vast as empty things”, Francis Bacon wrote – but perhaps JG Ballard stated it better in his short story, “Studio 5, The Stars”, a beautiful metaphor musing on the death of the Muse and subsequent fall of the Artist – and how it may be awakened once more:

“I suppose its principally a matter of inspiration. I used to write a fair amount myself years ago, but the impulse faded as soon as I could afford a VT set. In the old days a poet had to sacrifice himself in order to master his medium. Now that technical mastery is simply a question of pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial, there’s no need for sacrifice, no ideal to invent to make the sacrifice worthwhile -”

Dial a button, select some one else’s picture, post it on a blog and eagerly await acclaim. The creation replaced with selection. A gladiators arena of taste, not skill.

In Ballard’s story, Aurora Day, the Muse, by deception, threat and outright violence restores the order of inspiration and effort.

We eagerly await Aurora and the crusade against coin-operated-art. The possibility of her intervening remains the hope of Artists. In the mean time, there is much headway to be made simply be realizing that technology is not going to lead to what it once promised: The Dream of Superior Automated Content.

Piracy, being a criminal activity, thrives on governmental vacuum, corruption and geopolitical complicity. No current situation underlines this better than pirate activity off the coast of Somalia and the Arabian Sea. With virtually no government, extreme islamist factions battling for supremacy and no real global supervision, the theatre at sea off the coast of the ravaged land mirrors the plight of the land.

Listed below are some updated facts and numbers from the website of the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre.

Valid as of February 28th, 2011:

• Worldwide Incidents
  Total Attacks Worldwide: 87
  Total Hijackings Worldwide: 13
• Incidents Reported for Somalia
  Total Incidents: 61
  Total Hijackings:13
  Total Hostages: 243
  Total Killed: 7
• Current vessels held by Somali pirates
  Vessels: 33
  Hostages: 711

(Source: http://www.icc-ccs.org/home/piracy-reporting-centre/piracynewsafigures)

While hard to calculate the exact worldwide financial losses due to seaborne piracy (primarily aimed at transport vessels), estimates have pointed towards figures yearly between 13 and 16 billion USD. Compared to the trading volumes in the global market, even the high estimate is close to insignificant.

Even if the pirates at this stage pose no global strategic threat, the criminal activity certainly shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, pirate operations are ever bolder, better organised – and as of February 2011, also supplying extreme islamists in Somalia with funds. A dangerous, but perhaps inevitable turn of events. During this last month, there’s also been a notable change in behaviour on their part. While concentrating on transport vessels and commercial ships, pirates have also been known to capture private yachts and civilian ships. They have, however, never before executed or willfully used deadly force on their hostages. The 22nd of February marked a turning point when Somali pirates killed four American boaters while shadowed by a flotilla of military vessels. This is important as it signifies a change of behaviour on the part of the pirates, and perhaps even suggest political or ideological influence. A premature conclusion, but not out of line considering the aligning of forces (or rather, forced cooperation by the look of things) with radical islamists.

Three conclusions can be deducted from observing the pirates and the response of the global community.

One - engaging in conflict with pirate vessels at sea yields poor tactical success and is of little use in combating the problem. In order to mount a truly efficient operation pirates must be fought on land, denied safe havens and means of re-supplying. Even if opposing forces were to attack every suspicious ship in the area, sinking it and conducting a body count before an interrogation, the problem would still remain as long as there are points to draft new crews and replace equipment lost at sea.

Two - as long as the cost of conducting a land based raid on pirate havens (scattered all along the Somali coast) is in excess of the overall costs of piracy, there will be no international incentive towards decisively dealing with the problem. A factor of uncertainty in this conclusion and what might just tip the scales is the recent change in pirate behaviour towards executing hostages. As media reports of captured and killed boaters mount, governments might feel externally pressured into pursuing land-based operations rather than the largely pro forma activity of naval presence. That still remains to be seen. The execution of the American boaters might have yet been a one-off event.

Three - while there is no coherent force to combat pirate havens, there is increasing room for private protection contractors for hire available to shipping agencies, individuals and ships wanting to increase or even guarantee security in dangerous waters. Rumours of Erik Prince, former Navy SEAL and founder of the private military company, Blackwater (later renamed Xe), setting up new services in the region have been circulating for some time – and his recent exile to the region of Abu Dhabi certainly fans the flames.

Moore’s law states that:

The quantity of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

Decoded, this means that Moore predicts your computer to get twice as fast (powerful) every two years. Strictly speaking, “Moore’s law” isn’t really a law and has much more to do with empirical and even circumstantial evidence than it has to do with science. However, Gordon Moore was in fact one of the founders of hardware giant Intel and his observation has indeed served the community remarkably well during the last twenty odd years.

Until now, that is.

Because if you ask anyone actually utilising a modern computer, be it a closed standard product of Apple, a chaotic Windows machine or even a smart phone of whatever flavor – most users will perceive their machine as a slow and cumbersome (especially about a year after purchase). The success of the iPhone for instance, hinges almost exclusively on how well the interface handles; how smooth the transitions and how streamlined the “feel” of the application. The iPhone is no marvel of technology, most of the sensors and software inside it are basic gadgetry that has been around in one form or another for years. But it does one thing really well and it does it better than the competition.

The reverse is not true for modern computers, be it laptops of workstations. With all this computational power, increased memory reserves and silicone muscle – our machines are slower, generate more heat and are more inefficient than ever. In fact, it seems that for every new generation of machines to hit the market, the gap between computational power and software efficiency closes. If this development isn’t in some way countered, it might not be such a terribly bad guess that Moore’s law will work inversely when plotted on the scale of software speed at interface level.

The Internet is full of experiments where old, antiquated computers beat modern machines in just about every significant level, be it in word processing, boot time or interface response time. Obviously, old machines cannot go where the new ones do – and the spit and shine of new software is undeniably more polished. Yet, the core argument remains – why are the older machines faster, even if the looks and functions are dated? Are we to understand Moore’s law that in order for our computers to perform marvellous new functions, such as participating in the imbecile world of social media or taking part in online gaming carnage we have to sacrifice the efficiency and responsiveness of our interfaces? Surely, this cannot be the case.

Yet, it seems to be.

If we lift the bonnet, as it were, to our machine – and have a closer look at how software utilises hardware (a simplification for the sake of argument) – we are almost instantly struck by how bloated software processes have become. It is if the architecture of software suddenly realised that property is cheap, so there is no need for keeping the economy of building in check. The software real estate stretches on for inefficient miles inside the readily arable land of hardware. Or, if you’re not poetically inclined, modern software is badly written and by programmers who are prone to use lazy, obvious solutions instead of following the route of their predecessors and be sparse, clever and cunning with every bit and chunk of memory available.

Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, has often been chastised for once stating that: “640K should be enough for everyone”. However, even a casual glance at modern systems can induce a choking feeling in the throat of the beholder. We have a thousand times that capacity, yet usually do not perform to any significant level surpassing the code inside those ridiculed 640K. Perhaps the ill-fated statement of Mr. Gates should be tattooed on the arm of every programmer out there, embroidered above the entrance to every IT department and taught in schools to the effect of the pupils understanding that one of the most beautiful, underlying principles of all efficient progress can be summarised in the theory of Occam’s razor.

There are other implications for substandard code other than direct human convenience. Imagine millions of programs running poorly programmed software. All of these programs will generate heat and therefore use a greater amount of electricity than necessary to power its function. In times of ecological focus, is it not madness to program something poorly and further strain limited resources? Surely, if code is poetry, then why are our programmers chanting a collective requiem?

However, there is a beautiful irony regarding the expectations of some for our digital future. Apocalyptics herald the Singularity, an event where computers will “come alive” and more or less start to upload human conscience into the machine cloud (there remains some dispute as to the actual logistics). This is a scenario of apocalyptic totalism that will undoubtedly render a few smiles and mentions of lunacy should someone mention it during lunch break or at a party – but a surprising and rather frightful amount of industry leaders in Silicon Valley are fascinated by, and working tirelessly to this end (still think there are free online lunches?). The Lords of The Cloud brew deadly futures in their clandestine witches coven – and the unsuspecting public laughs. Regardless, the irony – lies in the fact that if the bulk of all publicly available software continues to be as poorly coded as it is now, the Singularity might never happen due to the fact that the human race will run out of time and fail to solve more pressing, acute issues and that this will ultimately prevent the Zero Event.

There are plenty of tech heavy reasons why software runs badly in spite of the abundance of powerful hardware. One being that software lock-in, a process where new, untested software becomes a standard that locks future progress into an uncomfortable spot, is a major problem for the community. Many things that we consider to be technologically sound are in fact rushed and lock us out (in) from better solutions simply because of the fact that they exist and proliferate. The basic exchange system with files, trees and folders, present in every personal computer being one such a rather poor standard, for instance. What is there to say that content in a computer has to be arranged as “files”? It certainly isn’t arranged that way in nature. And so on.

If one were to venture a guess, one could say that the progress of bloated software is irreversible. It staggers the mind to think that the on board computer of the American space shuttle has the capacity of 1 (one) megabyte of random access memory and has worked successfully for years – while a standard chat software (say, Skype) that in essence performs the trivial task of relaying messages across a network typically needs somewhere between 50 to 150 megabytes to function. Software bloat, coding standards and lock-in, has become a form of religion for those in the industry. Bringing the subject up is an instant irritant to almost all involved, sure to bring about an avalanche of invectives, excuses and animosity. In the mean time, the users suffer quietly at the hands of an industry too far gone to bring about any meaningful change.

While it is true that graphical interfaces haven’t nearly developed as much as the software it is supposed to represent (our best analogies still stem from the seventies and eighties), innovation in the field of computer science as perceived by the general public is painfully slow.

Looking at the situation from a different, above mentioned ironic, angle yields a number of philosophical issues. The human race accelerates losing in the process its cultural reference points, propelling itself into the event horizon at a velocity that makes the movement virtually indistinguishable from the accident. We move at ever greater velocities, rendering our faculties of interpreting the world blunted, borderline useless, as argued by Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard.  To counter this movement, this inhumanity – we are, at least in part, defended, championed even, by our own fallacy – by our own deeply human characteristic of inability, laziness, of settling for “good enough” once we reach a comfortable state of being.

Perhaps it is true then, the ancient saying that “The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth”?

However, the immobilising period of infancy is what ensures our survival. For the most part, being born as a blank slate (disregarding personality and genetic traits as ultimately, these are of very little consequence to man kind in general) is an excellent opportunity for the caretakers to imprint the individual with lessons learned from previous generations, in the hope of said individual reaching maturity, adulthood and being able to compose coherent, interesting thoughts and processes of its own to further aid its community – or himself. This is, again, where humans differ from animals, as the latter have no significant process of transmitting or retaining knowledge to their young.

In theory, this works and ensures man kind to evolve, in spite of being an imperfect and wasteful process as most individuals to reach adulthood never really transcend a state beyond that of an imprinted clone; their thoughts actions and indeed entire lives, are inconsequential and from a strictly ecological point of view – a rather poor use of scarce resources.

Nevertheless, at a time when technology has improved human life expectancy and enabled man kind a historical breather, as it were – the cult of infancy, man’s way of celebrating our prolonged lives – has become the status quo for the modern, evolved homo sapien. We are, and long to be, children in all but physiology (even if there are trends, mainly in fashion, to revert to these states, too) well into what used to be considered mid-life.

The technological landscape of the past, twenty, thirty years, has laid ground for what is today popularly called social media. A global, interconnected market of opinions and user generated content instead of proprietary, individually produced matter. The main trouble with this new model is that it is by and large an un-paid effort of the masses that in exchange for free software consent to being spied upon. Disregarding the fact that the software in questions is poorly built and rather demeaning to humans, the main point is that originality has for all intents and purpose ceased to exist – both online but rather more worryingly, also in society.

Culture has ground to a resounding halt online. Mashups, remixes, debates about cultural icons of the last fifty odd years and regurgitated, stolen content (called “open”) is routinely spun in the online blender to the extent of becoming one of the major bandwidth sources. Looking at modern music is like looking into often skillful, but very unoriginal, copies of material from the 70′s and onwards. Something similar is taking place in photography (with applications mimicking the flaws of old camera lenses, for instance), literature, art and just about every major cultural branch. For the first time in decades – there is nothing modern and nothing truly challenging in culture, save the drone of the ever-debasing, ever-dropping standards of dignity and integrity.

Enter the Modern Child. As many are aware of, children demand attention and if unchecked, will develop fatal egocentricity. Social media is the perfect tool for the modern child. A way of notifying the entire world, at the speed of routing packets to online servers – of one’s needs, tastes and other generally dull information. Social media is a success partly because it is a near-perfect tool of human regression. It is also the perfect cover for the obvious fact modern humans seem to be less capable of focus and social evolution. This prolonged state of adult infancy, or digital neonatality is also, rather ironically, what prevents the young from exploring new ideas. If the parent is still online, pushing their stale tastes to the world – how is the child ever to truly debut its mind to the public? Some re-use is fair game, that goes for all culture – we all build on the shoulders of giants, but what happens if nothing significantly new is introduced into the system?

In rejecting the individual and his way of bringing into the world, original content – and rewarding him for it – we have also rejected any meaningful evolution.

Social media is imbecile media because it does not embrace the quality of the individual thinker but rather embraces the tastes and motives of the unthinking collective.

Social media proponents often speak of empowering the individual, yet inspected closely – the success stories of this new format, scale badly or not at all. One idea will work for a single person, or website – and thousands will follow in the very same track – with no yield at all. This is proof of a failed communication model. Social media proponents grasp at straws to prove the usefulness of the channel but the rhetoric is murky. The real winners of social media are the few that can aggregate data streams (or, “the cloud”), not those who remix the content of those streams. In the long run, such a model is untenable for the users who are not only actively stripped of individuality (while being convinced of the opposite) but also of any means or expectations of receiving monetary rewards for their efforts. Rewards online come in the form of traffic sources and digital badges, much like the rewards given to children in kindergartens.

It is worrisome, for instance, to witness the state of journalism after the effects of the social media. Few are prepared to pay for content, so the quality of the content has become terribly low. This is particularly true in smaller, even if on the surface labelled “democratic” countries, like Sweden, where the media has never really had a honest, analytical mind of its own but has rather been a vehicle for political manipulation pretty much since the beginning of the printed word.

While there certainly exist a small number of assertive individuals who can manipulate the vast online network to their own ends, the bulk of the Internet citizens face a losing proposition. The Internet, much like many countries in the middle east – lacks a stable and comfortingly situational aware, middle class.

On the Internet, nearly everyone is a pawn: an unpaid, unskilled apparatchik.

Societies work and operate on the premise that everyone, or nearly everyone, agrees that they should. Laws and rules are laid out and for the most part, people stick to them, simply because they recognise that everyone has the most to gain from following them rather then breaking them. A lock is easily picked. Yet most do not pick it because they wish to have their own property untouched, as well. The Internet, however, has become a zone where these rules are dictated by a precious few, and changed at will. Property isn’t property, and few, if any, boundaries exist. It is a free fire zone that humans are quite incapable of managing. Or at least haven’t yet learned to manage.

In the mean time, we have millions of adult children playing and remixing culture, much like toddlers that rip pages from books and stuff them in their mouths. Presumably, some day, at least some of these children might grow up, rather than be stuck in the sorry state of perpetual childhood. In what state will our jointly remixed-to-dead-culture be by then? And how long will this take? The owners of the cloud, the Google’s and the Facebook’s are more than happy to play the part of the buddy-parent and throw ever-more faux-advanced software toys to their digital kindergarten – and few seem to be able to ever graduate from that macabre place of smelly diapers and nonsensical drool.

Perhaps hope lies in the fact that we have it from reliable sources that childhood isn’t only about bullying other children but also about boundless, unrestricted vision, high altitudes and magical worlds?

But if so – where are these worlds to be found?

He was, of course – correct.

Baudrillard’s central themes, as conveyed by his obscure, warped and near-uninterpretable prose – concern the Simulacrum as a a method of living. Incidentally – a large portion of the critique towards Baudrillard is directed at his method – and style of prose. Opaque and almost mystical it denies Academia punctilious right of interpretation, thus forcing them to reject it as non conforming trash-talk. A dismal, yet common response amongst the Academia that in truth have shown little creative faculty over the past two or three hundred years or so.

According to Baudrillard, the fake, the copied, the Projected Unreal – has indeed become the New Reality. As lofty as the statement might have seemed twenty years ago, it would be very hard to argue against it in this contemporary age of digital omniscience. For, as online relationships mold humans into non-human forms, as potent, frothy prophets scream in awe of the Singular Event, pushing a once promising human evolution into the rigid, locked-in framework of the Machine – the simulated has indeed not only become the real, but in fact replaced it.

Gustave Flaubert stated it like so;

“The better the telescopes become the more stars there will be”

The Open Celestial of possibility is now projected with scrambled, unintelligible snippets of disjointed information that dance in unstructured patterns of Media Logic. The distance between objective, deterministic truth bears no vital discrepancy to its opposite, chaotic relativism – as misinterpreted by the general public following Einsteins scientific breakthrough.

Paul Virilio, philosopher and father of the theory of Dromology, argues in “Negative Horizon”, 1984:

“Progressively doing away with our awareness of distances (cognitive distances), speed, in its violent approach, distances us from sensible realities; the more rapidly we advance toward the terminus of our movement, the more we regress until speed becomes, in a certain way, a premature infirmity, a literal myopia.”

Speed is the essential malaise with which we are distancing us from reality. The speed of information has all but hijacked our cognitive capabilities, rendered digital humanity a captive of its own invention. We are all becoming myopic servants of the Simulated reality.

In the age of Media Reason, reporters, journalists and other enfeebled, yet inexorable, agents of the information network – are now describing cataclysmic events, acts of intolerance and war zone scenes as: “unreal, like something from a movie”.

Thus, it is alarming to observe how that one particular phrase saturates not only the journalistic corps but in fact all of (digital) society. Humans no longer describe events using their senses, but relay them as if they be fitted into a stringent status box of a predetermined amount of characters. The stink of conflict and in its wake the shadow play of dismembered, dying bodies, visual impressions etched into a collective cortex, the ear-shattering sounds of steel cathedrals on caterpillar feet, the acute sensations of combat are no longer conveyed, or relayed in human form – but in the form of unfeeling apparatus, silicone and copper.

Thus, reporters, reporting from conflict zones seem unable to actually and matter of factly, report, but rather struggle with their own incomprehension of witnessed events. It is as if the calamities they are witnessing are projected onto the canvas of the event horizon, mimicking their own retinal, media-borne residue. Observe how a newspaper, or any other media source, is far more likely to obsess with the fact of reporters injured in combat zones (bah!) than actually relaying information and much needed analysis of the particulars of said combat. Damaged to the core, we experience reality in a trans-human manner – and are unable to meet it at its most poignant, the Human.

The script for the Real is no longer being written or recorded by us, it is projecting us into a phantasmagorical world we no longer have the means to understand. The denizens of the Real have replaced chemical suppressants, anti-depression drugs, with electronic suppressants – driven by an opposite function – an engorgement and frantic overreaction to human stimuli, then deprecated and re-molded into the only form of reality we, The Digital North, understand: the Real – as dictated by the Machine.

Worse, in such a climate, manipulation is de rigueur. Virally infecting the public with exuberant doses of politically correct counsel acts as a suppression mechanism for those yet unaccustomed to, or not assimilated into the Unreality Machine. The Singularity is a totalitarian system much better adopted to the mindset of the individual human digital drone than Marxism, or Maoism in its purest form ever was.

In harmony with these mechanism, we are witnessing the Singular Egypt Event. It is a pool of unreality for the digital dwellers of the Northern Hemisphere, to whom only a fascination with the intersection of revolutionary, and in un-projected reality rather insignificant, use of social media is of any lasting importance while the actual matters at hand: the who, why, how and blow-by-blow account of Hemingwayan tang are as insignificant as they are abhorrent.

The Real is all Greek to Them.

It belongs to those who possess a natural, near-mystical, absolute ability – to apply themselves.

Taste the concept: to apply one self to something (note the choice of words; “one”, “self”). A conversation, a book, a thought. To stroll, haste, or force one’s way down an avenue of one’s own choosing. Uninterrupted and on target. Without consulting the vast information maelstrom of the Internet, without chatting to anyone on your messenger contact list. Not meditating, but focusing on a thought hard enough to be able to conceive something original. Original in the sense that it is purely yours, not in the sense that it has not of been thought of before; even if that indeed could be a by-product of that particular practice.

Once down you step down that road, once you break the waterfront of your mind, you will notice that the systems that normally serve to keep you alert – are not only a nuisance, but only keep you from focusing. Perhaps this will irritate you. Perhaps you will be drawn back to their vortex, perhaps you have the strength of conviction and character to wave them off. Apart from purely physical diversions – the room you’re in, the sounds that reach you, the level of your personal comfort and so forth – if you’re sitting in front of anything resembling a modern work station, chances are that its user interface is clogged with badly designed software that constantly steals your attention.

As our technology evolves at breakneck pace, our minds stay by the same yard stick, more or less immovable. Humans learn slowly, and if we are to engage in deep thinking and not just at a level of electromechanics of twitching muscles (playing games or scanning social networks, for instance) – not many of us have the capacity for other simultaneous distractions. If anyone truly does.

Technology has overrun us to the point of forcing us to multitask, not on our own terms – but on its own. The sentient, singular, machine is in fact already here – and there’s no putting it nicely: It’s making us dumb as bricks. Because humans do not multitask. Humans think best when they think vertically, focused and systematic. In fact, what enabled the human kind to evolve in the first place was the time freed up from chores – for thinking. We’re simply not built for deep thought while multitasking. Yet nearly all our modern technology presupposes that we are, thus closing the historical arc where man kind had time for thought to its declining para bole – the time where we’re sped through our informational riches at a pace where none of it makes much sense to us – once more making us less capable of thinking.

Information, the way it is fashioned in its modern, silicone form – is an organised attack on consciousness and personality.

The Internet has long ago ceased to compete with other channels of entertainment, like television or cinema – but now competes with just about everything else. The millions of users addicted (yes, addicted) to social networks or fictional online gaming communities are proof enough that there’s a cheap and easy route of escaping the pains of thought and creation. As the current of users increases, the masses participate in a sort of public dream, the effects of which are highly detrimental to the creation of their personalities. This public dream has become a form a technology driven reality-denying engine, separating its users from their natural environment and propelling them into a personality-shredding nightmare.

The users of the Internet are like children in candy stores, stuffing little bits of everything into their mouths, resulting in a digestive breakdowns.

One might, and should, argue that thinking is not for everyone. Indeed, it is not. But thinking can, and should – be taught. It should be taught in schools that as things stand today – do little or nothing to that effect. The curriculum needs to be redesigned in order to shift from the problem of information filtering to how to build a resilience against distraction. Children, and adults, need to be taught the art of attention management.

While it may be a wonderful thought that all humans are equal, it is the ability of some to focus that constantly disproves it. If we are to achieve that dream beyond its slogan value, the task should start with teaching the ability to apply one self.

And no. There’s no app for that.

This is of course true. But is it an outrage only if anyone would be as naive as to actually believe that there exist such an idea as “neutrality” in world politics and that by simply assigning it to yourself, a nation gets instantly taken off the hot-list for invasion, harassment or war.

Would it have been that simple, surely, there would have been far less conflicts in the world as any threatened nation could simply have worn the non-aggression cloak and be done with the problem.

There are many different uses for “neutrality” and many scenarios when it can be a useful tool, but this is not a discourse of principle. Here, we will, however briefly – have a look at the particular Swedish brand of neutrality.

Whatever fine principles of non-aggression the rhetorical vendors of peace and justice might use – Sweden chose neutrality only because it had no other option. There were in fact no grand thoughts as to the value of man and no philosophical motives behind it. Sweden chose neutrality because it had lost too many wars on both foreign and local soil.

Following the end of the war with Russia in 1617, Sweden won both Estonia and Latvia. In one turn of events, it had cut off Russia from the Baltic. It would not be long before it would turn its eyes to further expanding its presence on the continent – and following that, a deepening engagement with Germany as the Swedes asserted their influence in the Thirty Year’s War. The Thirty Year war was essentially a religious battle in which the Swedes joined the Protestant side. When it ended, in 1648, Sweden had attained the status of a major European player – but had fallen short of dominating Germany the way it most likely would have wanted and in doing so also failed to expand its territories past the immediate winnings of the Baltic – a region it now almost totally dominated.

During the Great Norther Wars of 1700-1721, Sweden took on all four neighbouring states – and lost most of what it had won. Russia, under Peter The Great, was eager to regain access to the Baltic and had both time and resources with which to wear down a Sweden who in turn had always relied on military innovation and battlefield technology. By the end of 1721 Sweden was once again a pawn player in the politics of Europe and it would waste considerable time and effort to regain influence for over eight decades to come. Pitted against the Russian empire, the catastrophic outcome of the Finnish war both cost Sweden the remainder of her Finnish possessions as well as eliminated Sweden as dominant player in the Baltic region.

As a result, Sweden retreated to within its own borders and has for over two hundred years been licking her wounds, never to rise against neighbouring nations.

Sweden chose neutrality because it simply was the only option left.

With no neighbours with which to ally, a nation tired of war – and with no significant military resources with which to regain momentum, establishing neutrality was the one road still open.

Yet, Sweden was lucky. During the two last centuries, as the world re-wrote borders and history many times over, Sweden was essentially left alone. Mainly because no major player around her saw the need or gains of invading and in some part also due to Swedish geography that makes invasion a precarious affair for the aggressor. Simply put, the gains do not match the effort.

In the mean time, Swedes continued to evolve their military technology and stuck to the neutrality principle rigidly, rebuilding the nation and its technological wealth and even beginning a significant rearmament program prior to WWII as a direct result of German war policies.

After WWII, in which Sweden in fact featured more than it would give its leaders the credit for (mainly allowing Germans to resupply troops to their war effort in Norway,  transporting them across Swedish territory – a still sore and shameful point of Swedish relations to Norway, who fought on the Allied side) – the political alliances of Sweden’s neighbouring countries once again worked to their benefit. Denmark sided with NATO, with Copenhagen – not Stockholm, to draw the attention of the Russians in the event of war. With Germany divided by the Warsaw Pact and NATO, that threat too, had been eliminated. Sweden could remain an unaffected player in between as the two sides focused fire on each other for decades to come.

As the Cold War ended, Sweden came out of it further accessorised and had developed both defences and military innovation, not leaving its borders open to potentially hungry neighbours. During the Cold War years, and certainly after them, Sweden has developed a warm relationship to NATO, partly because of the political stability and friendliness with neighbouring Norway, Finland and Denmark – even though Denmark is probably the frostier friend due to its staunch, unrelenting support of the U.S.

Sweden has reestablished its presence as a key in the Baltic without having to wage actual war on its neighbours. Also, Swedish economic interests in the Baltic states have, in spite of incurring heavy losses during the recession of 2009, had the effect that the Swedes own large interests in the very same areas they had once lost to Russia. Sweden is on its way to reestablish Baltic dominance – and had the lofty experiment of the E.U, on many accounts not been such a blistering failure – Sweden would have had the chance to faster further their interests into mainland Europe in a fashion never previously available.

In all eventuality, whether Sweden abandons the principle of neutrality or not – is in fact quite irrelevant as its ties to both NATO as an organisation, individual NATO members and the rest of Europe are very much closer than they’ve been for well over two hundred years.

The media debate regarding neutrality is an unfortunate one and obscures issues that will become more pressing in the future, such as for example how to expand the Swedish territories in any direction in order to include as many ice free regions in the winter – a question that certainly will become an urgent one as winters get longer and harsher with the Gulf Stream threatening to continue to shy from Scandinavia in the years to come, re-establishing a climate that is much more synonymous with the Swedish longitude.

An irrelevant, naive even, discussion on the archaic and moral values of neutrality and governance will just further serve to distract the general public from the core issues: How to achieve and secure long term political and economical survivability.